There's different schools of thought around this and I certainly understand your perspective. At AWS, carrying a pager at limited times (in our team, 2-3 weeks per quarter as mentioned in the link) is considered an important part of our culture of operating at-scale services. In our team, we try to minimize oncall burden as much as possible by investing in automation, and only alarm if the system really doesn't know what to do. We have a separate planning bucket for burden reduction every quarter.
Other interesting thing to mention is that as an SDE you're not the only one that has oncall duties. In our team at least, PMTs are also oncall for about the same time. This creates a good dynamic as everyone is incentivized to minimize the oncall burden.
Other interesting thing to mention is that as an SDE you're not the only one that has oncall duties. In our team at least, PMTs are also oncall for about the same time. This creates a good dynamic as everyone is incentivized to minimize the oncall burden.